FORMS OF PHILOSOPHICAL WONDER: HUSSERL AND WITTGENSTEIN ON THE OBVIOUS

The article raises the question of possible common philosophical experience, a more fundamental one that the usual division into schools or traditions of philosophy. I propose to seek for such an experience in a typical (for the twentieth-century philosophy) form of a philosophical wonder which I would call the “oddity of the obvious”. Using the example of the Husserl's and Wittgenstein's philosophies, I try to demonstrate how this experience works, showing the important discrepancy between the two philosophers: a differently placed frontier between the sense and the nonsense. The most striking feature that characterizes the types of philosophical wonder established in the analytical and phenomenological traditions is an element that escapes their view: in the first case it is the being-in-itself which is considered absurd (widersinnig); in the second case it is pre-predicative experience which is proclaimed meaningless (unsinnig). I specify what strategies Husserl and Wittgenstein use, dealing with the experience of the “oddity of the obvious”; namely, they try either to retain the incomprehensibility of the obvious or to dissolve the “mental cramp”. The philosophical tradition (phenomenological or analytical one) takes one of the possible forms of the philosophical wonder to be the basic form. For the phenomenological philosophy, quite an emblematic feature is the effort to retain the “oddity of the obvious”, and for the analytical philosophy (of wittgensteinian provenance) – the dissolution of “mental cramp”, of philosophical bewilderment, the release from vague intellectual disquiet. Concluding the article, I propose to consider the alteration of the philosophical wonder models as a possibility of overcoming intrashop discrepancies between the philosophical traditions.